'WARNING: BAD LANGUAGE BELOW'

The life of a stock lad was hard manual labour and that created a voracious appetite. I was hungry all the time, and being paid £40 a week was not cutting it.

My parents were being completely unreasonable and since I started work they were demanding something called ‘board’.

I had to give them around £5 a week for food, lodgings, and for them to keep me in clean knickers. It was fucking outrageous, but they wouldn’t listen to reason.

At the time I was spending my entire wage on records, so had little left for work-time food, and why spend when you can eat for free?

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The back shop was used to store ‘damages'. Damages were damaged goods. Smashed jars of jam, opened packets of biscuits, out of date Mr. Kipling cakes, packs of sugar that had been slashed open… you get the picture?

I was warned early in my Kwiksave career by Carrot, not to eat damages as being caught would result in instant dismissal.

During the summer months, these damages started to stink very quickly, with maggots springing from them and countless fruit flies buzzing around everywhere.

I wouldn’t want to eat this stuff, lest I end up in hospital with salmonella or worse. It was a collective mess of sticky boxes and taken away by "The Load" on an intermittent basis.

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There was also a walk-in fridge that contained the overspill stock of pies, pasties, cheese, yoghurts and basically any other perishable foods.

I took some incredible risks sneaking in the fridge to snaffle a pastie on quite a regular basis which became my mid-morning snack.

If Mort had walked in I would have been caught red-handed, and that would have been curtains to my illustrious Kwiksave career.

The lesson from Asda had still not been learned at this point.

Mort used to offer to sell me out of date cakes for a few pence lower than the original value. I did buy them sometimes, but I can’t quite shake the feeling that the miserable bastard just pocketed the money himself.

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As well as regular goods deliveries, frozen goods were part of the stock at Kwiksave. They arrived in a separate consignment.

Handling large boxes of frozen goods is not fun at all. For example, a box of frozen peas contains around 24 large packets of the goods and a load of ice which makes them solid and heavy.

Unlike most other goods, the frozen goods were not kept in boxes, they had to be emptied and placed in nice piles so the customers could access them easily.

Without any gloves, I was expected to empty a full pallet of frozen goods into one of around 12 large chest freezers on the shop floor.

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I hated this job, my hands went numb, turning first red and then blue.

Mort kept well away from the freezer goods as that would have meant work. On the positive side, I didn't have him loitering around me, to ensure I was 'working hard enough'.

The excess items had to be stored in a walk in-freezer next to Sid’s place. It was a lit room and could be locked from the outside quite easily resulting in a slow death over time.

It didn’t cross my mind at that age, but the me of now thinks that Mort could have easily murdered me at any time knowing I was in there freezing my bollocks off every week.

Worst of all was the Sugar delivery. I used to literally shake with fear and dread when Mort called to me, “Sugar delivery…, get on with it now", in his customary curt manner.

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Unlike the ‘Load’, the one with ‘Kwiksave’ written on the side, the sugar truck was an independent operator and delivered by a driver from the depths of hell.

Most delivery vehicles have a platform; you place the pallet full of goods onto the platform, the driver presses a button and the hydraulic vehicle loading platform goes up or down.

Not so with the sugar truck. This vehicle even by standards of 1981 was positively ancient and did not possess a loading platform.

Sugar is packed into thick brown paper for transportation. In this paper there are 24 x 1kg bags, so that’s 24kg per brown bag.

I am quite sure Mort and sugarbloke had some deal going as I caught them both whispering more than once.

‘Here’s a quid, throw those bags hard…’

sugarbloke was some kind of hellish psychopath and relentlessly threw these 24 bags pack bags of sugar at high speed while humming "Sugar, Sugar", the 1969 lovey-dovey song by The Archies; I was dealing with a maniac.

60 bags later, I was bruised and red-faced with the sheer effort needed to keep up with singing grinning sugarbloke who would every now and again chime in…

“Come on wimp, it’s not that bad… here.. CATCH.”

My arms and chest got a weekly ritual bruising due to that fucker and his 'deal with Mort'.

Mort was not going to murder me in the freezers; he wanted to torment me, for as long as humanly possible.

Cover Picture is a combination of free sources from here and here, combined and edited with Luminar 4. Any unsourced images are my own.

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